A Vigil on the Edge of Christendom

Croatia’s witness is not an outlier. It is a template. Not because it is perfect, but because it has bled and still believes.

Filip Gašpar is a political advisor and publicist with Croatian roots from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He specializes in strategic communication, international positioning, and conservative networks. He regularly writes for German and international outlets such as JUNGE FREIHEIT, The European Conservative, and various media across the former Yugoslavia.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily in agreement or contradiction with those of The American Postliberal.

On July 5, 2025, in Zagreb, a nation gathered around a man the West has spent decades trying to ignore. Marko Perković, better known as Thompson, is a veteran of Croatia’s war for independence, a singer whose lyrics invoke Christ, homeland, martyrdom, and memory. To his critics, he is a nationalist idol. To his supporters, he is something older: a voice from the trenches, a bard of belonging, a reminder that faith and fatherland are not relics, but roots.

That evening, more than 500,000 Croats assembled—not for spectacle, but for sacrament. In the midst of Europe’s deracination, its managerial secularism, its enforced amnesia, this was not a concert. It was an ordered defiance. While post-national regimes suppress memory and catechize shame, this nation stood firm: invoking Christ, mourning her dead, and raising her flag without apology.

We do not offer analysis. We offer witness.

Croatia is a small Adriatic nation, Catholic by heritage, scarred by war, and unbroken in memory. Once a Habsburg kingdom, then a Yugoslav republic, it declared independence in 1991 and defended it through siege, sacrifice, and blood. Unlike much of the West, it never fully de-Christianized. Its churches are full. Its wounds remain open.

It is not a place where history is managed. It is remembered. That unbroken memory took visible form on a summer night in Zagreb. It began with a blessing, answered not with irony, but with reverence.

The sun had begun to set. Light touched the red-and-white flags. A priest approached. Then came the music. Then came the silence. This was not nostalgia. This was insurgency.

It was the largest patriotic rock event in European history, and more than that: a rite of memory. The crowd came not only from every Croatian region, but from Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, and the United States. The gathering was peaceful, solemn, and massive; unified not by aesthetic taste, but by something older: nation, cross, sacrifice.

What unfolded was not merely artistic. It was theological. A liturgical act performed in public space.

For over three hours, Perković—war veteran, cultural icon, sacramental witness—led a nation in remembering. Songs of survival. Hymns of devotion. Psalms transfigured through melody.

He opened:

Praised be Jesus and Mary, my dear people! Thank you for coming in such great numbers.

Tonight, we want to express unity. You’ve come from every part of Croatia. We all share the

same values—love for family and for our homeland. Return to your roots and your

traditions—return to your Christian foundations.

This was not cultural programming. It was covenant renewal. In a city governed by the progressive-left Možemo movement, whose mayor Tomislav Tomašević preaches multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and the ritual dismantling of national memory, this event stood as an unignorable contradiction.

It was a symbolic reclaiming of desecrated civic space.

For once, the city did not belong to the managerial class. It belonged to those who still pray aloud, who still bury their dead with hymns, and who do not apologize for loving their nation.

The regimes of Western Europe no longer fear God. They fear memory. They fear anything not compliant, not taxonomized, not managed. This is why Perković provokes them: because he sings what their children were forbidden to hear—that nations are not accidents, and that martyrs do not die in vain.

At the event’s spiritual apex, a Catholic priest joined him on stage. A single candle appeared on the screens. The word was Bleiburg. The year: 1945. A massacre committed against fleeing Croats by Tito’s partisans. Untried. Unmourned. Unforgiven, almost unknown in the West, but etched deep in the nation’s soul.

Then came Maranatha, composed by Bishop Ante Ivas of Šibenik. “Come, Lord Jesus,” sang the multitude, not as abstraction, but as invocation. The crowd understood the stakes. In the liturgical imagination, time collapses. The dead are not past. They are present.

Then the vow. During Neću izdat ja (“I Will Not Betray”), Perković handed the microphone to young Catholic artist Petar Buljan. The crowd joined him in solemn declaration, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)

Above them, hundreds of drones lit the night sky with the image of the Cross, the Virgin Mary, and the Croatian flag. The heavens were ritually ordered. Beneath them, silence fell.

Half a million voices ceased to sing—not out of fatigue, but awe. The space became sacred. This was not performance. It was presence. Not expression. Consecration.

His name is not stagecraft. It is a testament.

Marko Perković was born in Čavoglave, a village in the Dalmatian hinterland; a place too small for maps, but not for memory. In 1991, as Yugoslavia collapsed into war, he joined the Croatian forces not as an officer, but as a volunteer. He fought on the southern front, defending his home region near Drniš from encroaching forces loyal to the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army.

The weapon he carried was an old American Thompson submachine gun—icon of the mid-century battlefield, resurrected in Balkan resistance. He bore it through the trenches of Čavoglave. The gun became his name. Not as glamour. As biography.

Thompson was not a brand. It was witness.

From the soldier came the singer. From the submachine gun, a microphone. From the warfront, a hymn.

Then, as if descending into history, the moment turned from stillness to defiance. The opening chords of Bojna Čavoglave shook the plain. The battle hymn of 1991. The song of the first months of the Homeland War. Long before Perković filled stadiums, it traveled by cassette to frontlines, an acoustic relic of national deliverance.

Its first words: Za dom spremni—“For the homeland, ready.”

A phrase now debated in Croatian courts and media. Some rulings call it unconstitutional; others recognize it as historically specific to the Homeland War. Abroad, it is often reduced to “fascist” shorthand.

But for many in attendance, it carried a different weight: not an ideological marker, but a gesture of defiance, memory, and national resilience. Western commentators have labeled it dangerous.

Not because of what it said—but because of what it remembered.

Perković has been slandered for decades. He has been accused of blurring the lines between history and ideology. But what he offers is not ideology. It is biography. His lyrics dwell not on 1941, but 1991. Not on conquest, but survival. He has publicly and repeatedly rejected fascism. The accusations persist not out of historical rigor, but because memory itself is now suspect.

In a West where public ritual is sterile and state-sanctioned, what occurred in Zagreb was intolerable. Flags flew without apology. Children sang with fathers. Christian banners rose in the public square. It did not include. It invoked. It did not conform. It consecrated.

This was not backlash. It was benediction.

The drone-formed images of Cross, Madonna, Flag did not target others. They oriented the faithful. They pointed toward roots, not enemies. They made the invisible visible.

To many Americans, Croatia is unfamiliar terrain, at most a country mentioned in the footnotes of Cold War collapse, but its story matters now more than ever. Because what it reveals is that faith, nation, and memory can still coexist—and even flourish—in public. It reminds us that cultural inheritance need not be erased to secure peace. It warns us that Western attempts to export ideological amnesia have not gone unchallenged.

The crowd was not anti-American, but it was profoundly anti-globalist.

Not everyone rejoiced. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić called the concert “a great shame for Croatia and for the European Union,” accusing it of promoting “pro-Nazi values.” His outrage, though theatrical, was instructive: the memory wars of post-Yugoslavia are far from over. And Croatia has chosen to remember on its own terms.

Western leaders once clapped along, sang along—until told not to. Now, to sing is suspect. To remember without apology has become the new transgression.

Those who remember cannot be reeducated. And those who resist reeducation will always be called dangerous.

The concert closed with Perković addressing the youth, “You are stronger and more steadfast than we ever were. We, the older generation, can die in peace—because we’ve handed Croatia into safe hands.”

Then ending, simply with, “Thank you for coming. We’ll see each other again.”

He meant it. Not as marketing. As covenant.

The West has not run out of time, but it has run out of excuses. The future will not belong to technocrats, but to peoples who remember who they are. People who remember altar before algorithm, martyrs before markets, and the Cross before consensus.

Croatia’s witness is not an outlier. It is a template. Not because it is perfect, but because it has bled and still believes.

Memory, rightly ordered, is resistance.

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